Quote Originally Posted by blue lander View Post
Okay, let's assume that when you blow on a cartridge you're leaving a milimeter (or less, whatever) of spit on the connectors. Then like Ed says, those beads of spit could potentially connect several pins togeather and short the cartridge out. And if Ed's theory is correct and the only reason to blow on cartridges is to dissolves the corrosion left on the pins from the last time you blew in it, then why did we start blowing on cartridges in the first place? And why does this happen primarily to the NES instead of across all cartridge based systems? Shouldn't they all have corrosion problems, or shouldn't they all have bent back pins that need spit to make connection?
Despite the fact that I've seen the same type of green and black mold/oxidation/corrosion in cartridges from Atari 2600 to Gameboy Advance (pretty much the last cart-based-system to have that style of top-lipped cartridge) including but not limited to NES, Genesis, Super NES, N64, and so on and so forth ...

... and I'm NOT claiming that these THEORIES are anything other than that, but I'm also not comfortable just writing this shit off because people like to be contrarians.

Let me review where I'm coming from just to get this back on track.

During my 5 years with Funcoland, I bought and sold THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of used NES games (as well as Genesis, SNES, N64, GB etc.) and I'd estimate that about 25% to 35% had mild to heavy corrosion going on in them.

A majority of people have been blowing in cartridges to get them to work for over twenty years.

A majority of people don't know what kind of damage they're causing.

I've NEVER seen anybody attempt ANY TYPE of experiment to see if blowing in cartridges causes any damage whatsoever.

As I stated clearly in the beginning of this thing, I don't care about multimeters, electron microscopes, PKE meters, nuclear reactors, or any other method for doing high-end electronic testing of these cartridges in actual NES systems or otherwise.

That's just too much to deal with and it's more trouble than it's worth - because we KNOW that a game with CRAP growing on/breaking down the contacts is NOT GOING TO WORK.

I wanted to do a simple experiment to see ONE EFFING THING:

DOES BLOWING IN GAMES CAUSE CORROSION TO HAPPEN?

DOES BLOWING IN GAMES CAUSE ANY DAMAGE AT ALL?

I'm really glad that this has evoked intelligent discussion on the topic ... but, as most intelligent discussions go on the internet, things are starting to become a contest as to who can trump whom's knowledge of this that and the other thing.

I just want to have fun with this, and if that means not posting any further responses and just updating the main page then that's how I guess it's going to have to go for me, because I'm really starting to get tired of defending things that I've openly expressed as nothing more than theoretical against things that are tantamount the same weight theoretically but presented as hard fact. (Again, standard internet debate logic.)

So, for those who are interested in results, stay tuned for updates on page one, but I'm signing off on the discussion henceforth.